Report: Pioneer to exit TV business
Updated 2/12/09 at 9:35 a.m. PST with Pioneer's confirmation.
Pioneer will no longer manufacture televisions and plans to spin off its DVD player business into a joint venture with Sharp, according to a report in Japan's Nikkei newspaper.
The company is reportedly exiting the TV business rather than continue to incur losses in that division. This latest report comes a few months after Pioneer announced it anticipated huge losses at the end of its fiscal year in March and plans to lay off 2,000 workers.
Pioneer had built itself into a widely respected maker of plasma televisions, but last March said it would not make the plasma panels anymore because of skyrocketing costs and mounting losses in its TV division. It tapped Panasonic to provide the panels instead, but that deal appears now short-lived. Another clue this was coming: Pioneer showed no specific models of TVs at CES last month.
Pioneer is not alone among TV makers losing money. Everyone from Panasonic to Samsung to Sony is facing layoffs and large quarterly losses.
Update: Pioneer confirmed it will stop producing televisions by March 2010 and cut 16 percent of its employees.
Erica Ogg is a CNET News reporter who covers Apple, HP, Dell, and other PC makers, as well as the consumer electronics industry. She's also one of the hosts of CNET News' Daily Podcast. In her non-work life, she's a history geek, a loyal Dodgers fan, and a mac-and-cheese connoisseur. E-mail Erica. 
I distinctly remember the first plasma TV I ever saw. It was a $13,999 42" Pioneer on display in Fry's Electronics in San Jose in 1999. I thought to myself, "Who the hell is ever gonna buy one of those?!?!?" Of course, people did, because it was during the dot.com boom where money flowed in the streets and out of the tailpipes of Silicon Valley Porsches, Ferraris, & MBZs. In my heart, I secretly lusted after it and knew I would have one someday...
Bottom line, putting too big of a price tag on a product equals minimal to no-sales, which in turn stalls or closes doors on product purchase, ultimately ending product development... Why not lower the price points, let the workers keep their jobs, and keep making TV's? Making the sets more affordable increases sales and revenue for the company, product development continues and the consumers can still obtain a great product! It's a win-win situation if implemented. However, $$$ Greed seems to always show its face and trump the overall decisions... Such a shame!
- by JDTaznor February 11, 2009 8:00 PM PST
- JzzSngr - I'm sure you meant the 60" Elite since Pioneer doesn't make an 80" model.
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(8 Comments)About whether to buy now or wait for a discount...I suppose it comes down to how much of a gambler are you? If the rumor is true and the 9G Kuro wil be the last of it's breed from Pioneer, that means your chance to get one is pretty much limited to units that have already been assembled and shipped to distributors or the big retailers.
Now think about this for a moment...these are extremely costly to produce. (This by the way is why the cost to the consumer is high as opposed to greed. It doesn't take a rocket scientist to understand that if the profit margin on them were excessive, the division wouldn't be bleeding the red ink it is.)
This means that, unlike your usual run of the mill piece of electronic gear, specialty items like these aren?t blindly run off the assembly line to sit in warehouses. The units in the supply chain are very closely monitored?both by the manufacturer AND the dealer network. No one wants to get holding the bag on gear at this price level. And, especially in these dire economic times, you can be sure inventories on hand have been squeezed to the max. One way to confirm this would be to go in to your local Magnolia dealer and sweet talk him into checking the number of units available in his region.
Then consider that, again, if this rumor is true, Pioneer has probably already long since cut parts orders from their suppliers and, in fact, may have actually ceased production weeks ago, thus further tightening the supply.
And finally, one other item to consider is that there are probably scads of folks all across the planet, just like yourself, who?ve been sitting on the fence trying to decide between getting the 9G or waiting for the 10G. News, or even a rumor like this will cause the demand curve to spike.
When you consider all these factors, it's obvious there will not be some huge excess inventory of them that will cause a deep discount in price. Actually, there?s a pretty good chance that the supply is going to be so tight that dealers will likely be getting the full MSRP for each remaining unit.
So?once again, how much of a gambler are you? Are you willing to risk saving a few hundred dollars against missing out on a state of the art piece of gear that may not be replicated for years to come?